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No Means No: Even Riot Threats Can't Save Cop Tax
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 At some point, LAPD Chief William Bratton and Mayor Hahn have to take the hint: The plan to tax us all a half-cent on the dollar to put more cops on L.A.'s streets is utterly doomed.
The City Council shot down a bid today to put the cop tax on the May ballot, and with it one of the last hopes that L.A. will get anywhere near the patrolmen it needs, let alone the 1,260 more Bratton wants. The vote was 9-6 in favor of the tax - one vote shy of the 10-vote majority required. Voting against: Alex Padilla, Bernard C. Parks, Greig Smith, Jack Weiss, Dennis Zine and Antonio Villaraigosa.
The vote came after a three-hour debate during which Bratton pointed at the sketchy LAPD shooting death of a 13-year-old car-theft suspect Devin Brown three days ago and intoned, "At each incident we risk this city going up in flames once again, which has happened twice in recent history ..."
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With even bonafide reality-scare tactics like that failing - and he's right, south L.A.'s righteously pissed over Brown's death, and rioting over the next incident if not this one is a potential risk - Bratton and Hahn are going to have to find the money for more cops elsewhere.
Count on Hahn's opponents to make political hay on this as a "Hahn defeat" - Bob Hertzberg's even arguing that the money for more cops has existed in the city budget all along, and Parks has argued that ending the three-day work week would do the trick. But the bottom line is that the council lacked the guts to levy any more taxes on us, even though we're woefully under-policed.
Yeah, I would have paid the extra half-cent because frankly, I think cops do a better job when they're not stretched so thin. Thin, as in we have only 9,100 cops for just about 4 million people, compared with 27,000 in New York City, which has only twice our population. Maybe with more cops on the street to share the pressure, they'd be less likely to shoot kids or beat docile suspects with flashlights.
But the measure keeps failing - a simple majority of L.A. County voters favoring it in November was not the 2/3rds needed, and the Council failed to pass it for the first time, shortly thereafter. Time to pull back and take stock, gents. It's not working.
(Spotted at LAObserved, which does a much better job than I can of parsing the politics of council Prez. Steve Padilla)
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Wednesday, February 09, 2005 - 11:41 PM
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